July 17, 2025

This piece is sponsored by Lemonly.

Your company’s website might be your most valuable marketing tool. That’s certainly the case for Lemonly, the Sioux Falls-based infographic design agency. Launching a website, then, is an important project to get right.

Earlier this spring, Lemonly debuted a website built to showcase the company’s design portfolio and creative service offerings. The process of rebuilding Lemonly’s website from the ground up involved almost every member of the agency’s 24-person team, not to mention a major collaboration with its sister agency, Click Rain, who served as the development team on the project.

The project makes a strong case study on the value of a strategically built, highly performant website for businesses in any industry.

Building a website with multiple audiences in mind

Websites are the cornerstone of successful marketing, especially for B2B companies. Most company websites serve as a digital storefront — a place where potential customers can browse a business’ offerings and consider their options.

Lemonly’s site serves that same purpose and more. It also acts as the agency’s design portfolio, main source of new business leads, resource hub and storytelling tool. These different goals stem from the site’s need to address several audiences. Multiple audiences visit lemonly.com for different purposes:

• Clients and new business prospects who are looking for info about Lemonly’s capabilities and browsing the project portfolio.
• Infographic fans and content seekers who come across Lemonly’s editorial content on Google search or social media, including everyone from pop culture buffs and sports fans to pet owners and music lovers.
• Creatives and content marketers who enjoy Lemonly’s work or want inspiration and tips about design, visual storytelling or company culture.
• Lemonly team members who use the site as a searchable database of project examples and a company archive.
• Fans, friends and family who keep up with Lemonly’s blog, email newsletter and latest happenings.

That mix of audiences and purposes makes Lemonly’s website unique and challenging to reengineer. The site needs to support each of these goals and user groups, but its most important function is as a marketing tool that helps Lemonly grow its business. With niche services that appeal to clients from a wide range of industries and geographies, Lemonly’s website is by far its top source of new business.

Anyone from anywhere who is looking for an agency partner specialized in infographics, animated explainer videos or other visual storytelling should find Lemonly early in their search, so the website needs to give them the information they need to convert.

New services pages and refreshed case studies spotlight Lemonly’s creative capabilities and clients’ results.

“All of our marketing comes back to the website — our social media, email newsletter, editorial content, paid media — everything,” said Nick Lorang, senior marketing and communication manager at Lemonly.

“We hope to grab people’s attention with interesting visuals, then get them back to the website where they find something they love, like examples from our work portfolio or a blog post. From there, our website visitors self-segment pretty well. Folks interested in working with Lemonly browse our portfolio and services, then reach out to book a call. And folks who want to see more infographics and editorial stuff find plenty of that to peruse as well.”

Lemonly’s website is able to serve these audiences and achieve the team’s goals because of intentional design and a robust backend database.

A strong focus on visuals

For a graphic design company, where design chops are at least as important a differentiator as price and process, showing your work is as important as explaining your services and selling points. Many of Lemonly’s new clients book a call or close the deal after seeing the agency’s work portfolio. The portfolio is an ever-growing section of the website almost 900 examples strong — an impressive collection, but just a fraction of the 4,000-plus projects under the company’s belt since 2011.

Lemonly’s website is uniquely suited for presenting the company’s extensive portfolio of visual content. These “sweet visuals” take many forms: static and animated infographics, videos, reports, presentations, interactive microsites, branding and more. As a showcase for Lemonly’s capabilities, the site needs to display multiple file types, handle large image sizes and do it all while loading quickly and prioritizing accessibility.

“We want our website to be a place where we showcase our work in its very best form. That was important from a design and development perspective, ensuring we included all the visual flexibility and technical functionality to display everything we make,” said Amy Moore, co-founder and executive creative director at Lemonly and the website’s lead designer. “Visuals are our business, so the site should let all our visuals shine.”

A work portfolio built to search and scale

Rebuilding Lemonly’s website presented the opportunity to reengineer the database behind the site’s largest component: almost 900 examples in Lemonly’s ever-growing work portfolio.

Previously, work examples were categorized by service category — infographics, videos, reports, etc. — and searchable by client or keyword. On the new site, a more sophisticated categorization scheme allows for more flexibility, variety and shareability: Each example can be tagged by service category, client, industry, story type/genre, visual style and purpose/objective, along with keyword search.

Lemonly team members can access advanced search filters to generate highly relevant collections of work for potential clients.

“We updated our work categories to reflect what our service offerings look like today, and we greatly expanded the types of metadata and search criteria we accommodate,” Lorang explained. “Now, we can run searches with multiple criteria to surface a highly specific, neatly curated collection of examples that’s exactly the right fit for what someone is looking for.”

Say, for instance, infographics created for health care clients with the goal of brand awareness. Or technology explainer videos featuring character animation. Maybe timeline infographics or travel microcontent. The possible combinations are fun to imagine, and the practical usefulness is even more attractive: In sales conversations, Lemonly can provide a shareable collection of relevant examples from its portfolio in just seconds. Seeing the company’s work, after all, is the No. 1 deal-closer.

Migrating from WordPress to Craft CMS

Before this year’s launch, lemonly.com hadn’t had a redesign since 2017. That version of the site, built in WordPress, served the company well during its lifespan. But Lemonly’s team, services and work have grown and evolved a lot in the past eight years.

In particular, the company’s 2021 acquisition by Click Rain Inc. brought new possibilities to the table. Click Rain, now a sister agency to Lemonly, specializes in building websites. The stage was set for an upgrade.

“We outgrew our old website awhile ago,” Lorang said. “Our brand has evolved, our work is more diverse now, and we had limitations in what we could showcase on the old site. But it took some time before we were in a place to rebuild it in terms of both the strategic know-how and the time to devote to it. Partnering with Click Rain made that possible.”

Redesigning the website also meant migrating to a new content management system. Click Rain’s preferred platform is Craft CMS — a robust, flexible CMS with a well-established developer community, a strong focus on accessibility and an easy-to-learn user interface for site managers and content authors.

“Craft CMS really focuses on the authoring experience. They really care about security and making sure content is easy to create and manage,” said Kaitlyn Martinez, associate director of development and accessibility at Click Rain and the lead developer on the project. “They also make it easy for developers to work in. It’s super-customizable and -scalable. You can build highly custom sites and functionality.”

The move to Craft meant Lemonly could tap into those benefits along with Click Rain’s deep expertise with the CMS for long-term support.

Sister-agency collaboration makes it possible

The Lemonly team says collaborating with Click Rain made all the difference in rebuilding the website. Click Rain specializes in high-performing websites and digital marketing with a knack for simplifying complex problems and innovating in the face of new challenges. The agencies’ connection made collaborating easy and an obvious win.

“We create awesome visuals for clients every day, but Click Rain are the experts when it comes to building full-scale websites,” Moore said. “They guided us through the process, helped us understand the complexities, handled our questions and just made all our dreams come true. We all put our hearts into this site. Click Rain built it to be a performance marketing machine, and we added our signature Lemonly zest.”

Kaitlyn Martinez, associate director of development and accessibility at Click Rain, served as lead developer on the Lemonly website project.

On the development side, Lemonly’s website presented a few challenges Click Rain was ready to tackle. These included the work portfolio and search functionality, unique media types, interactive elements and more.

“The Lemonly website is unique in that it has just about everything that could make a website project complex,” Martinez said. “Hundreds of pages, multiple page types, a searchable work database with a separate logged-in experience, a multi-filter blog, custom block types, large images and multiple media types, animated and interactive graphics, you name it. We put nearly all the bells and whistles into it.”

The combination of development by Click Rain with content and design by Lemonly makes the website a true collaboration, with each agency bringing its best to the table. For the agencies’ clients, that same blend of talents makes for excellent work that stands apart and gets results.

“Lemonly is a very fun, creative brand,” Martinez added. “It was fun to get to make sure the site captures that energy and showcases their work.”

Strong performance gains show impact of site architecture, strategy

Two months’ post-launch, the new website is showing major performance gains for Lemonly’s goals in site speed, organic search, accessibility and sales effectiveness. Positive results stem from a number of factors that add up to better overall site performance.

A few highlights from website results so far:

• On the old site, 100 percent of pages had a “poor” score from Google’s Core Web Vitals, largely because of an aging codebase and suboptimal image handling. Now, 100 percent of pages have a perfect score.
• SEO gains are among the most exciting. For instance, on keywords related to animated explainer videos, Lemonly has seen a 412 percent increase in SEO visibility from the old site to the new. Among Lemonly’s targeted keywords for agency services, they’ve seen a +9.2 gain in Google rankings, landing high on the first page of search results for all targeted keywords.
• Accessibility is much improved as well. From color contrast and motion controls to content structure, the site was built with accessibility in mind from the start.
• New business leads are up too. Since site launch, Lemonly has seen a 330 percent increase in the share of incoming leads that meet their highest quality benchmark.

All in all, early signs point to strong days ahead for the home of the world’s best infographics. The new website is helping both interested customers and infographic fans alike find what they’re looking for faster and more easily, whether it’s great content to enjoy or a top-notch creative partner to help solve their brand’s communication challenges. Lemonly hopes to keep growing both audiences in the months ahead.

New opportunities ahead for Lemonly marketing, sales, creative

Now that the website is launched, the Lemonly team is looking forward to the opportunities it unlocks for their marketing, sales and creative work.

As the company’s foremost marketing tool, the website is primed to help Lemonly grow its business. Improved backend functionality makes traffic acquisition more reliable for better paid media optimization and audience targeting. New content with a stronger focus on Lemonly’s services and customer education is designed to move new leads through the sales funnel. Plus, the site’s flexible building blocks and strategic site architecture make expanding site content and building custom experiences much easier.

For Lemonly’s creative work, the new website makes an even better showcase of the agency’s capabilities. A refreshed aesthetic emphasizes Lemonly’s playfulness and infographic-inspired flair, blending 3D elements with the brand’s illustrative style. Support for diverse media types and a wide array of block options make displaying static, animated and interactive work all more functional and beautiful.

“The sky’s the limit for what our team can create,” Moore said. “Having a website that helps us show off our full range of capabilities just adds more headroom to the cool things we can create to help clients tell their stories.”

As Lemonly looks ahead to the rest of 2025 and beyond, its recently launched website is sure to play a key role in its next chapter, from attracting new business to showcasing the agency’s impressive portfolio. Visit lemonly.com to check it out for yourself.

Planning a website project of your own? Click Rain is here to help. Reach out to learn how their team of experts can make launching or redesigning your website simple and effective.